God on the Ash Heap

God on the Ash Heap--April 15, 2019

"Those who passed by derided Jesus, shaking their heads and saying, 'Aha! You who would destroy the temple and built it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross'!" [Mark 15:29-30]

As I write, the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris is burning, and its spire has fallen.  News reports have not yet revealed the cause or source of the fire--only the shock and deep sorrow being felt around the world now to watch this magnificent building, built seven centuries ago, as it is engulfed in flames. It feels, as I watch the video footage on a screen half a world away, like being punched in the gut.

Such places feel sacred to us.  Of course they do.  And not only because it is in buildings like these where God is worshipped and Christ is praised--but also because it rocks us to our core to see buildings that have stood for centuries ravaged and destroyed.  All of a sudden our sense of what is permanent and unchanging gets shaken to the very foundations.  These places do not contain God--we know that--and yet places like Le Notre-Dame de Paris feel like they bring us into the presence of God, not just in the beauty of their colored rose windows or flying buttresses, but because some part of us long--just utterly longs--for there to be somewhere, just somewhere, on this beautiful, terrible planet that is safe... that is untouchable... that is sanctuary.  

We long for there to be a building, a place, a system, a structure, something, that we could know will last forever, that we could build the rest of our lives on top of and know there was solid ground beneath us. If the glorious and sacred space of a place like Notre-Dame is not safe, what place is?  We asked similar questions, didn't we, when we found ourselves in the fall of 2001 watching the Twin Towers fall, and a plane crashing into the Pentagon, and a fourth intended to be used the same way before being brought down in Somerset by passengers trying to stop destruction?  We asked, "If this place isn't secure, where is safe anymore? If these symbols of our way of life can be reduced to fire and rubble, what is there to hold onto?"

We know what it is like, here in the place where I live, for local and neighboring church buildings to catch fire--that story has been told more than a few times even just among churches within a half hour drive of my house.  We know that it is not only the loss of a place to pray (which, again, we already know intellectually can happen anywhere), but the loss of the connection to generations of saints who prayed and lived and labored there calling on the name of God.  We know that places where we worship feel like a part of ourselves--and to lose a building is also to lose something that held us together.  We know that the destruction of buildings makes us feel afraid, no matter the cause, and we even fear whether our way of life is being destroyed along with the bricks and mortar.  

There had to have been that kind of heartache, that kind of gut-wrenching terror, at the mere suggestion of the Temple in Jerusalem being destroyed, too.  The people of Jerusalem had seen their Temple destroyed once before, when the city was destroyed by the Babylonians in the great exile (586BC), and it broke the nation.  Even though a later generation of exiles came back home to Judea seven decades later, life was not the same for them.  The destruction of their holy place made them ask impossible questions, like, "Has our God been defeated if our Temple was destroyed?"  "Was God killed when Babylonians came?"  "Are we a people anymore, if our central unifying institution has been burned to the ground?"  It took a long, long time for any kind of answers to emerge--and when they did, the people realized that even though they could continue living their faith without a Temple, something had been irreversibly changed.  This was not a world in which such terrible things are always stopped in the nick of time--and they could not longer live in the illusion that it was.  The generation that saw the first Temple destroyed had to learn a difficult lesson--that it is still possible to believe in God even if that same God allows our most precious and holy treasures to be destroyed.

When Jesus came on the scene, the Temple had been rebuilt, first in a modest reconstruction effort, and then expanded and enhanced during the reign of Herod the Great (trying to burnish his credentials and boost his legacy), and it was again a wonder to behold.  But when Jesus walked through it in the last Monday or Tuesday of his life and saw the way it had been coopted into a system of buying access to God, he upset the tables and drove the animals out which would have been bought for sacrifice.  It was, for everyone watching that day in Jerusalem, a symbolic destruction of the Temple and a deliberately provocative act.  It was the sort of thing that got a man crucified, in fact.  The reports were that Jesus was threatening to knock the whole building down and then raise it up again in three days--and even though the Gospel writers insist that this was Jesus' coded way of talking about his own death and resurrection, just Jesus' words alone were shocking.  They sounded like a threat of terrorism.  They sounded like--or at least they could be taken out of context and misused to sound like--Jesus was being glib and casual with talk of destroying the very heart of his people's religious, political, and cultural life.  Jesus had spoken openly about the end of a building that had stood for centuries, upon the foundation of the earlier building that had stood for centuries before that, the center point of Jewish worship, prayer, and national identity.  To even give a hint of a suggestion that it would be destroyed would make you Public Enemy Number One.

And that is exactly what gets thrown back in Jesus' face on the cross.  The crowds bring back the incident in the Temple, and Jesus' cryptic remark about raising it up in three days, and they mock Jesus with those words.  "You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!"  The underlying assumption is clear--and biting: if God were really with Jesus, these terrible things wouldn't happen.  If Jesus really had the power he claimed to have, he wouldn't be dying on a cross.  If this rabbi were really able to do what he claimed, he wouldn't have gotten put up on a cross.  The crowds have turned on Jesus, at least in part, because he dared to suggest that their most sacred and stable institutions--even religious ones!--could be destroyed, and yet that God was there in the midst of the rubble.

And that might just be the hardest truth to accept in this faith of ours: the notion that faith in God does not exempt us from Temples being destroyed, or cathedrals being burned, or church buildings closing.  God is real, and God is good, and God is faithful--and yet Jesus still goes to the cross... and yet Notre-Dame is still burning... and yet the Temple was in fact knocked down a second time, eventually by the Romans a generation after Jesus' ministry.  The hard thing to accept is that God's presence doesn't always look like success... or winning... or preserving the stable and familiar systems of our lives.  Sometimes--in fact, you could say, at the most important times in the universe, perhaps--God is present at exactly the point of loss: the burning spire, the destroyed foundation, the crucified Christ.

Learning to live with a God who doesn't guarantee that the things we want to save will always be saved is a challenge.  It means accepting that God is still God even when our loved ones die, or our church buildings close, or historic landmarks burn.  It means being allowed to be angry and hurt and dismayed at this same God, when we want to know why things like this happen.  And it means learning to see God's presence not only in the building that stands for centuries, but in the ash heap as well, weeping with us in our fear and insecurity.  it means learning to see God's presence not only in times of obvious victory, but even more clearly in a moment of unmistakable defeat on the cross.  It means being able to grieve the real losses of places we have loved and cherished and longed to see, and also to believe that the God who shows up on a cross is also free to show up in ashes and smoke, in heartbreak and loss, and even in a borrowed grave.

Oh boy, it's only Monday afternoon of this Holy Week, and there is already so much loss.  Lord, give us the grace to step through this day and into the next, meeting you even in places of deep loss and suffering.  Help us to see you where we least expect you.